“So embarrassing”: The 1993 movie that launched Jennifer Aniston and haunted her ever since
Although she is best known for her work on the hit sitcom Friends, Jennifer Aniston has enjoyed a successful career outside of the group of 20-somethings who get up to endless hijinks in Manhattan.
Whether it be Bruce Almighty, Marley & Me, Wanderlust, or We’re the Millers, more often than not, Aniston has been in successful productions, with most doing their bit to crystallise her standing as one of her generation’s most successful actors.
But let’s be honest, not every film she has made has been a winner, and Murder Mystery is a case in point. Aniston can usually be relied upon to raise a laugh or two, and comedy has always been her strongest suit. Just look at her career, from Friends to Horrible Bosses. For decades, Aniston has built a reputation for being consistently entertaining, and that ability to deliver a good time has helped her maintain such a loyal fanbase.
Despite enjoying a career that has earned her both a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe, Aniston does not look back fondly on every project she has been involved with. In fact, there is one role in particular that the Friends star has dismissed as “so embarrassing”, which doesn’t bode particularly well.
The film in question was Leprechaun, the controversial 1993 comedy-horror oddity that saw Warwick Davis play a murderous leprechaun hunting down the people he believed had stolen his gold. Against all odds, the film became something of a cult hit, turning a modest $1million budget into an $8.6m box office return and spawning an entire franchise. While horror fans have spent decades embracing its campy charms, Aniston has been far less enthusiastic. In fact, she has admitted that the film makes her cringe, and at the time, she genuinely worried it might bring her fledgling Hollywood career to a premature end.
With hindsight, it’s easy to forget just how precarious Aniston’s position was at the time. This was several years before Friends transformed her into one of the most recognisable faces on the box, and like countless young actors trying to get a foothold in Hollywood, she was taking whatever opportunities came her way. Plenty of future stars have horror films tucked away at the start of their filmographies, but few have one quite as fucking bonkers as Leprechaun. In that sense, Aniston’s discomfort is understandable; nobody sets out dreaming that a murderous goblin will become part of their legacy.
During a 2021 video interview with InStyle Magazine, Aniston revealed her true thoughts on Leprechaun, which came via mention of one of her other early films, 1999’s Office Space. At one point during the interview, she was challenged to pick items from a bag that each had relevance to her life. Here, she looked back on Office Space and discussed how it became a cult title.
“Office Space [was] one of the first movies I ever did,” Aniston recalled. “No one thought it would become the cult classic that it did, but it’s pretty cool if you ask me.”
She continued: “There’s loads of movies where you’re thinking: ‘Oh god, this is just… how am I going to survive this in my future?’ And then it’s a cult… ‘something’ because it’s so embarrassing.”
The actor then explained that she didn’t mean that Office Space was an “embarrassing” picture. “That movie wasn’t! That movie was special,” she said before humorously murmuring, “I was talking about Leprechaun.”
Aniston’s revelation comes after comments she made in 2019 when she said she had re-watched Leprechaun ten years earlier with her ex-boyfriend Justin Theroux. Although the couple stuck it on for “shits and giggles”, she couldn’t bear it and kept leaving the room, “cringing”.
Yet the strange thing about cult cinema is that quality is often beside the point. The very elements that make performers wince decades later can be the same things that audiences grow to cherish. Across Britain, where video-shop oddities and late-night Channel 4 discoveries have long been celebrated, Leprechaun found exactly the sort of audience willing to embrace its absurdity. It may never have earned critical acclaim, but its longevity proves that a film doesn’t need prestige to leave a mark on popular culture.
Still, I can’t help but wonder how Warwick Davis feels about the film.
